Most scientific research is directed towards answering a question. Fortunately for researchers, there are a lot of questions in science that don’t yet have answers, some of which are quite fundamental. If you do a quick google search for ‘unanswered questions in science’, for example, you’ll come across questions like: What is spacetime? What is […]
Category: Different perspectives
An introduction to liquid crystals
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that there’s more to the world around us than the three states of matter that we learn about at school. In the short time that we’ve been writing we’ve looked at plasma, dark matter and colloidal systems, all of which challenge the traditional view that […]
What does the periodic table really look like?
Hi. So what’s this? OK, so it would have been a better question had the answer not been in the title of the post… But you would have known this was a Periodic Table anyway, right? And that’s quite amazing from just the outline (no details) of what is just a series of rectangles (or […]
Why can’t the microwaves fit through the holes? Visualising e-m waves
Many microwave ovens have a gauze in their window, to reflect the microwaves and keep them inside the oven. Someone once asked me “How come the microwaves can’t fit through the holes?” It’s a brilliant question. Which we are not going to answer. If you want to, you can look up ‘how diffraction depends on […]
Orbits, gravity and the atmosphere
“Things float in space because there’s no gravity above the atmosphere, right?” I was thinking about this common misconception, and I thought I’d share it (I just did!) and then explain ‘the truth’. And then it occurred to me that this misconception is so interesting that exploring how/why it is so tenacious and persuasive in […]
Earth’s atmosphere
This wasn’t supposed to be a post on Earth’s atmosphere. I was trying to write about a common but underappreciated misconception about orbits, gravity and the atmosphere (post to follow!). But I kept writing phrases like “above the atmosphere”. And it became clear I was being dishonest. I mean I know that there is no […]
What will happen to our sun?
In our previous post I described that the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram: Shows a survey of the properties of all the stars in the galaxy Provides a means of describing the lifecycle of a single star In this post I will concentrate on the second of these, and ask “what will happen to the Sun, and what […]
Gels – solids, liquids or something else?
We are all taught at school that there are three states of matter, although those of you who read our recent post on the topic will know that there are more. Even so, we tend to label the materials that we encounter in our everyday lives as solids, liquids and gases and don’t often need […]
Analogy in science – this blog post works just like a whistle
There’s a fantastic story about Isidor Rabi (I think), who won the Nobel Prize for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). NMR is an indispensable technique in chemical analysis, and also the basis of MRI scanners in hospitals. This story shows that Rabi must have had the admirable trait of being secure enough in […]
Big numbers
In a previous post I argued that it is hard to picture a billion, or a billionth. Because a billion is a pretty big number. However, in science we need to deal all the time with numbers much bigger than that, even if they aren’t easy to visualise. The fact that they aren’t easy to […]
Who first split the atom? And, how to win quizzes…
Growing up I knew that the answer to the quiz question ‘Who first split the atom?’ was ‘Ernest Rutherford’, even if I didn’t necessarily know exactly what the question meant. It still occurs in quiz circles – check out question 20 in the Daily Telegraph’s science and nature quiz from 2010. The answer is Ernest […]
What does 4380 mean? Or, how much coffee is in a half-pound bag of coffee…?
The number 4380 got picked from a random pressing of the numeric keypad. It could be any number. We’re going to discuss the semi-random number, 4380, as a way to get, maybe, a fresh insight into what numbers do. Numbers for counting The first thing to say is that 4380, as written (and we’ll write […]
Science is hard if you anthropomorphize your molecules
The inspiration for this post comes from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (if you are from a generation unfamiliar with these Bill Watterson cartoons, then go and discover them after reading this blog). Calvin sees his mum crying in the kitchen, and asks why. She explains that she is cutting up an onion, to which […]
Trying to visualise a nanometre
Working in science, and more recently in science communication, I frequently find myself working in the nano-world – wavelengths measured in nanometres, nanostructures, forces that act over unimaginably short length scales. I never used to question these distances – they were all just numbers followed by ‘nm’. Recently, however, after thinking about various topics to write […]